Continued from Part 1 – The Concept
With the concept done, it was time to get a rough model built. My first couple of attempts were failures. I was unhappy with the flow of the mesh, and when I tried to extrude limbs from it things just kept getting worse. It got me thinking back to something I heard from one of my professors in college… in essence: “Extruding garbage produces more garbage.” It is important to start with a solid foundation and go from there so less time is spent in the later stages cleaning up the mess.
On my third restart, I finally started to get the hang of things. From there it was just a matter of adding detail and doing minor cleanup until I produced something close to the grey shirt version of the female character.
Yellow: Version 1, Green/Purple: Version 2, Pink: Version 3, and Blue: Pink Mesh pieces combined into one
To speed up the process, I grabbed the face and hands from an old female character we were using with the intention of replacing them with newly modeled parts later on down the line.
At this point I wanted to add a jacket. Unsure of the best method, I simply copied her torso and cut away all portions that weren’t jacket.
Fitting the jacket to the female player character.
After some fiddling, I wasn’t entirely happy with it so it got put on the backburner until I had more time to get it right.
The final version of her before moving out of the "Rough" phase of modeling
Continued in Creating a Character: Part 3 – Refining and Texturing
